


long reflection

by aibari



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Dimension Travel, Gen, Kid Jon, S1 Archive Crew, Time Travel, gen-ish in terms of romance, i don't have a map for this one and i'm playing it by ear, kid martin, magic mirrors you might say, mirrors ... but Bad, no promises for gen-ish anything else
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:08:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26595775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aibari/pseuds/aibari
Summary: There is a mirror that is not like a mirror, and it sits in the waterline beneath Bournemouth Pier, waiting.He is nine years old when he finds the mirror. It takes him somewhere else.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 33
Kudos: 104





	1. mirror, mirror

**Author's Note:**

> right!!
> 
> this was going to be a quick one-shot for the cancelled tma beach day, and now it's something else. that thing is incredibly on brand for me, but probably also at least a little inspired by [through the looking glass](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16173707/chapters/37791470) by [the_watchers_crown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Watchers_Crown/pseuds/The_Watchers_Crown).
> 
> i have a vague outline for this one and it should be short-ish (stares at the ceiling. please. please let it be short.), current estimate is ~4-5 parts, there's no update schedule because i am a chaos gremlin.
> 
> thanks to dathen and spade for some input on what season to go with for later chapters!

There is a mirror that is not like a mirror, and it sits in the waterline beneath Bournemouth Pier, waiting.

It is not exactly hungry, but hunger is a word that comes close to touching the thing that fills it.

Water laps against its outline.

It sits there silently and waits.

-

There is a mirror that is not a mirror, and it lingers on the riverfront outside of the Tate Modern.

It is visible some of the time, and never to the same person more than once.

This mirror is not exactly hungry, either.

But it wants, if you can call it want.

It _lacks_.

Water laps against its outline.

It sits there silently and waits.

-

There is a boy -

His name is Jon. He is nine.

Something happened to him - to his - to someone he knew, last year, and it sits like a lump in his throat, oozing something thick and sticky and foul down all the way into his gut, something that collects and calcifies in sharp deposits he is getting used to breathing around.

He doesn't think about it like that.

He doesn't want to think about it at all, really, but it's all he wants to think about. This year, he has read every book in the library about mysterious disappearances and urban legends and paranoia - even (sweating, dizzy, fingers digging into the dips under his kneecaps,) the ones about spiders.

It hasn't yielded any results.

He's starting to suspect that maybe the library isn't the right place to find out.

Sometimes he wonders if he made it all up.

If -

But it was real, he thinks. It _was_ real, and it had … teeth, or mandibles, which Jon has seen too many of this year, in illustrated books and in his dreams and -

He hasn’t been sleeping well. The unease lives in him like a headache, like something with too many legs. It’s getting bad enough that even his gran is starting to notice, looking at him with a faint, unhappy frown, like she thinks he’s being difficult to be difficult.

And maybe he is, a bit.

Maybe it’s hard not to be.

Maybe the best thing he can do is lean into being contrary, and then no-one will bother him, and the only one who will be eaten by next time will be him.

-

  
  


There is a boy -

His name is Martin. He is nine.

Last year, he had a dad.

He doesn’t anymore.

Not in any way that counts.

-

He goes wandering.

He tries not to, most of the time, but today he’s feeling … restless.

More restless than usual.

He finds himself down at the beach without registering the walk in between, on autopilot, and that realisation brings a small shiver of nausea, makes him think about the last time he went somewhere without noticing where he was going.

But this is different, he tells himself, firmly.

I went out, he thinks.

I opened the door, he thinks. And I decided to go for a walk.

So it’s different.

It _is._

He bites at the inside of his lower lip, pulling at the skin. It’s September, and the beach is almost empty. The sand is grey and wet and cakey from the rain that rolled across town this morning, and it sticks to his trainers.

He walks down to the waterline.

If it was warmer, he might take his shoes off and roll his trouser legs up and go wading in the water, but it’s cold enough that the thought alone makes his toes squirm. He walks along the side of it instead, watching for sea glass and odd stones, and it’s nice.

Then he sees it, in front of him, under the pier.

It hangs suspended over the water, and it looks like -

Like -

A mirror, Jon’s mind supplies.

But that’s not quite right.

Looking at it makes Jon’s mind slip and skitter and flinch, like a picture that makes sense until you start looking at the details. It looks like something that shouldn’t be what it is, and it makes his teeth hurt, it makes his eyes hurt.

He doesn’t want to look at it anymore.

He wants to look at it until it makes sense, until he can figure out what the trick is.

There must be some trick, he thinks, high-pitched even in his own brain.

There must be, because if it isn’t -

There must be. There is.

  
  


-

They’re on a class trip to the Tate Modern, and Martin gets lost.

It’s less the layout and more the art. He keeps falling behind to stare at things, at paintings and photos and installations, and all around him people are looking at the same things, standing in the same space, being.

Martin doesn’t have the words to describe how it makes him feel.

Not yet.

For now he’s just standing in it, being, and the rest of his class filter out of the room and go - somewhere else, somewhere not here.

When he realises that he’s alone, it’s too late.

With a bright burst of panic, he speed-walks out of the exhibition room and back out into the atrium, down the stairs two steps at a time until he gets down to the ground floor.

He can’t see the rest of the class anywhere.

He swallows, throat thich and sharp all at once, and stumbles out of the building, into the wet autumn air. Miss K is going to be frustrated with him for not following the rest of the class.

Maybe she’ll call Martin’s mum about it.

She will, Martin thinks, cold with dread. If Martin can’t find the rest of the class before they realise he’s missing, she’s probably going to have to.

His mum is going to be so angry.

Martin sits down heavily on the edge of the waterfront. The pavement is cold and just wet enough that his jeans get damp.

He should keep looking for the others.

He should keep looking, but it’s hard to breathe, and he keeps swallowing and blinking back tears and being probably the moistest person alive.

And -

There is something in front of him. Like -

A mirror, his mind supplies, even though it’s wrong.

Like something else.

Martin doesn’t have the word for it.

He thinks maybe there isn’t one.

-

And he knows better.

He _knows_.

But there is some kind of _pull_ ,

a string going taught and tugging,

and reaching out

towards the mirror that is not a mirror

feels as natural as breathing.

when his fingers touch the surface of it,

there is a single, unfragmented second

when nothing happens, except

he can feel it, like

someone is holding their breath

and then

its surface shivers

and ripples

and breaks


	2. 0 1 1 2 3 5 8

It’s not like walking through a door, and it isn’t like waking.

Jon is just - touching the mirror, and then he isn’t.

Between one breath and the next, he finds himself standing in the middle of an empty room. It’s cold, and the walls are made of glass, or something that looks like glass. There’s something … _wrong_ about them, something swirly under the surface.

It makes him feel a bit sick, looking at them, so he tries not to.

Then -

It’s not that it makes a sound.

There is just a change of -

Pressure, maybe. Like when you get down from a tall place and your ears pop, and suddenly you can hear properly again even if you hadn’t realised you couldn’t in the first place.

It’s like that, and he knows, suddenly, that he’s not alone.

He turns around.

There’s a boy standing behind him. He’s about Jon’s height, but the way he is standing makes him look smaller. His hair is curling around his ears, over his ears, and he’s pudgy, and his face is full of freckles, even though it’s September. He looks -

Soft, Jon’s mind supplies.

“Who are you?” he asks.

The boy blinks at him, dazed. “What?”

Then something seems to click in his head, because his eyes flick wildly around the room, even though his head almost doesn’t move at all. “ _What_ ,” he says again, but it sounds less like a question this time, more like a statement.

Jon flounders a bit, because _what_ isn’t a question he knows how to answer and the boy didn’t answer _his_ question and now he doesn’t know what to do.

The boy flounders, too, wringing his hands. 

They stand there for a moment. Jon takes a breath.

“I’m Jon,” he says.

“... Martin,” Martin says, hesitantly. Then he looks around the room again, biting his lip. “What _is_ this place?”

Jon frowns at the floor. It’s made of - stone, maybe. It doesn’t move like the walls do, staying dark and inert even when he moves, reflecting nothing.

“I don’t know,” he says. He hates saying it almost as much as he hates not knowing, so he starts making a list of the things he _does_ know instead of dwelling on it.

There is a mirror that is a door, and he went through it.

The room they’re in has eight walls that hurt to look at and a flat, dark ceiling and a flat, dark floor.

The mirrors might be doors, maybe. He isn’t sure if he wants to find out.

Martin doesn’t know what’s going on.

But … it would make sense if he got here the same way, maybe. A mirror that’s a door.

“Did you touch a mirror?” Jon asks.

“It was … sort of,” Martin says. He frowns at the walls around them, winces, scrubs at his face, which is … wet?

“Have you been crying?” Jon blurts.

Martin goes very still. “No,” he says.

Which _clearly_ isn’t true. “Then why is your face wet?”

“It’s _fine_ ,” Martin says, like that answers the question, and hunches in on himself again, smaller, like he is trying to disappear.

“That’s not what I asked,” Jon says, carried forward by his own momentum, and he knows even as he says it that it’s the wrong thing to say, that he’s messing it up, that he should be less -

Well. Too late for that now. He chews at the inside of his lip.

Martin is staring at his shoes. He looks _miserable_ , which isn’t weird when they’re trapped in some weird - _mirror dimension_ , but if he has been crying, he was crying before he got here.

“S-sorry,” Jon says. “I didn’t mean to…”

Make you uncomfortable, he thinks, but isn’t quite able to make himself say.

Martin’s eyes flit up to his face and down again.

“It’s fine,” he says again. “It’s - it doesn’t matter.” He laughs, small and nervous and a little high-pitched. “We j-just got eaten by a mirror?”

“Yeah,” Jon says. He shudders. “That’s -”

“Proper weird,” says Martin.

“It’s,” Jon says, and, “yeah.”

“I’m, um,” Martin says, “‘tleast we aren’t alone.”

He gives Jon a pale smile.

Jon doesn't know what to do with his face, so he bites at the inside of his mouth and shifts his weight and nods jerkily, all rusty hinges, but part of him feels … warm.

“I was alone last time,” he blurts, and then shuts his mouth so hard it makes his teeth hurt. His face turns hot; there’s a rushing in his ears, and he’s _never told anyone about -_

Martin looks at him, wide-eyed. “You’ve been here before?”

Jon stares back, caught.

Thinks, he’ll think I’m a liar.

Thinks, he’ll think I’m _bad_.

But -

But it’s out now, and they’re trapped here together, and things can get worse but it’s not like they can get _worse_ , he supposes, and -

He takes a breath. He tries to keep it steady.

“I’m, er,” he says, and his voice warps like cardboard under water. He coughs and tries again. “It wasn’t … related? It was just … a spooky book.”

“A spooky book?” Martin repeats.

Jon laughs a little desperately, digs his fingers into the bones of his wrist. “Y-yeah. It, it was called _A Guest for Mister Spider_ , and I was reading it, and then I was at a park a few streets away from my house.”

He isn’t telling this story right, but Martin isn’t looking bored or laughing at him or - or worse. He’s just … listening. Not looking away.

Jon swallows. “I, I hadn’t meant to go there,” he says. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even notice I was going, suddenly I was just _there_ and, and this, guy stole the book from me? He was making fun of me, but then _he_ began reading it, and then - then he started walking. And all I could think about was getting the book back, so I followed him, and - and there was this, this _door_ , and he knocked on it _,_ and -” (- he feels it like it happened to _him_ , the door opening and the cobweb winding around him and the limbs that reached out, long and bony and covered in coarse hair - ) “- and then a monster got him.”

Martin’s mouth hangs slightly open. Then he swallows. “That’s horrible,” he says.

“And I,” Jon says, and he hates himself for saying it, but it’s _true_ , and if he’s going to tell this story, he has to _tell it_ , even if it makes his stomach churn so badly he thinks he might be sick. He pulls the words out one by one like splinters. “It was my fault. I could have helped him. I could have stopped it. But I didn’t. I just went home.”

“That’s stupid,” Martin says. When Jon looks up at him, he’s got his arms crossed, eyebrows turned in so hard they’re nearly touching. Jon flushes, goes hot with shame.

“Yeah,” he mutters, looks back down at his shoes, curls his fingers and nails tight into his palms.

“There was a _monster,_ ” Martin says, “and _he_ stole the book from you, so. So that - that serves him _right_!”

“Wh-what?” Jon manages.

“Yeah!” Martin says, with enough force that Jon goes a little speechless. “And anyway it would probably just have eaten you too!”

“Y-yeah,” Jon admits, feeling - feeling strange. Outside of himself and inside of himself all at once. “I … I suppose?”

Martin gives a fierce nod. The moment stretches out until it goes weird; Martin starts pulling at his sweater again and Jon bites the tip of his tongue and tries desperately to think of something to say that’s not _that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me_ , because that’s -

It’s not true. He thinks he’s pretty sure that’s not true.

It sticks around, though, clinging to the roof of his mouth like a film, threatening to come loose and spill out into the space between them.

And - and he wants to -

“So,” he says, because he needs to _say_ something, suddenly, like not talking, like staying in the quiet, is going to twist him all the way up in pieces, “so, so, I … we’re in, um, an eight-sided room, which could - _could_ be significant? It’s … eight is a Fibonacci number, which means it’s made up of the two Fibonacci numbers that came before it, and, and it’s the first number that’s not a prime or a semiprime, and, and it’s … ah,” he trails off awkwardly and clears his throat, “that’s. Probably not important, is it?”

Martin is staring at him. He looks a little dazed.

“Sorry,” Jon mutters.

“N-no,” Martin says, “it’s - what’d you say a Fibonacci number was?”

“Well, it’s, um,” Jon says, and then he’s off, explaining, talking about seashells and Matrameru numbers and the golden ratio, half-forgetting where they are. Martin keeps looking at him like he’s listening, like he cares about what Jon has to say, and it’s strange, but it’s … nice. It’s _nice,_ and it makes him feel a bit less scared, talking about something he knows, something he’s spent time looking up, carefully, because a teacher mentioned it off-hand and it hit him in that way that meant he _had_ to know more, had to understand it better.

“Cool,” Martin says. He says it quietly. He says it like he means it.

“Yeah,” Jon says. He doesn’t know how long he’s been talking for. He thinks it probably doesn’t matter here.

It doesn’t take long for the unease to creep back in under his skin.

In the mirrors, their reflections move without their input.

Jon squeezes his eyes shut.

"What do you think the walls are made of," he says, not all the way a question.

"... glass?" Martin says. He looks around at the walls again, takes a step and a half away from Jon.

"Glass doesn't hurt to look at," Jon says. He wants to reach out and pull Martin back, just in case the walls … _do_ something, but he doesn’t, and he tries very hard to not imagine what the walls might do, either.

"Depends on the glass," Martin murmurs. He takes another step, reaches out a hand -

The reflections swirl and twist and hum -

“ _Don’t_ ,” Jon cries. He half-steps, half-falls forward, arms outstretched, reaching for Martin’s shoulders, trying to stop him from touching the mirrors that aren’t.

He bumps into him from behind, and what he meant to do was catch him, but he stumbles, and it becomes a push instead.

They crash into the wall - Martin makes a sound like an exclamation mark - and in response, the wall crashes up around them like a wave, cold and sharp and liquid.

The hum rises to a whining fever pitch, and then -

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! you can find me [@aibari](https://aibari.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.
> 
> if you want to read more of my stuff, i've got [fairy tale jm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24880387), [a Very Melancholy twilight au](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26252383/chapters/63901378), and [pre-s4 to post- _post_ apocalypse wtgfs](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586131), plus [some other stuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aibari/pseuds/aibari/works)!


End file.
